Legal Research

Digitized Legal Materials from Canadiana.org

By Simon Fodden

I learned recently that the University of Alberta has been digitizing microfilm or microfiche from the collection of Canadiana.org and placing the scans on the Internet Archive. (There’s a PowerPoint presentation online that will give you some sense of U of A’s digitization projects.) At present a search for [contributor:(canadiana.org)] turns up over 22,000 items. Of these, just under 800 are tagged “law” in some respect.

There is no attempt to catalog these items in any useful way, which means a researcher must rely on searching — not the easiest thing on the Internet Archive. (For example, had I not known of the Canadiana.org project, I doubt I would have been able to find the collection without much thrashing around.) But this collection is well worth browsing through. I came across a pamphlet dated 1890 (I think — the metadata is either nonexistent or hard to discover) entitled “Curriculum of the Law School and Curriculum of the Law Society Examinations, Osgoode Hall, Toronto.” I’ve copied off the required courses and readings for the three years of law school, if you’d like to see [PDF] how different/similar legal education was 120 years ago.

There is a wealth of interesting and useful material here, as there is in other digitization projects’ repositories. Now some order needs to be imposed on the various products so that it will be possible actually to make use of them. And, I’d suggest, a clearing house is needed to coordinate all of the various and laudable digitizing projects across the country.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 28, 2010 (boomark / email).